Our paper aims to identify the functions of dreams about food, preparing food and eating experienced by characters in 19th-century English and Romanian novels. Fictional descriptions of dreams about food and eating are usually associated with experiencing absence, anxiety, struggle and desire. Our analysis will correlate the functions of dreams about food and eating to the private and public spheres of life, as well as to gender. Eating was regarded as having consequences not only at the physical and mental level of the human body, but also in terms of social order: the poor asking for more food is an …